


Not Like This

by crossingwinter



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:40:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22217176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: He has always wanted her—just not like this.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Edelgard von Hresvelg
Comments: 7
Kudos: 103





	Not Like This

**Author's Note:**

> listen we all know he spends all of the second half of the game confusedly crysturbating i don't make the rules.

Existence is unbearable.

Dimitri learned that young.

All that is good dies. Winter always returns, and summer is a lie. 

It was summer when she taught him to dance. It was summer when he let himself believe that maybe it was fate—the two of them together at Garreg Mach after so many years. It was summer, summer, endless summer.

-

She’s always been beautiful, but it is not her beauty that is the most striking. It is her strength, the firmness with which she speaks, her confidence, her vision. He’d given her a knife once, thinking that she would need it to protect herself. He’d wanted her to be safe, to stay alive.

He could laugh now.

He’d have been better off jamming it into her gut, letting the dreams of hope and happiness die before winter came and blew them all away.

-

He always has preferred the spear. It is a noble weapon, one that requires more finesse than people think. He couches his spear under his arm when he tilts, though he doesn’t ride much anymore. He doesn’t need a horse to die beneath him just because he has lost all sense of self-preservation. No, he’ll fight on foot when he can. 

The spear he’s chosen is smooth ash, with a silver tip. It can pierce even the strongest armor, reinforced the way it is. How many times has he had it remade when he has gone to the blacksmith? “I can sell you a better one,” the blacksmith always tells him. 

“No,” he always replies. 

This was the spear he’d been carrying when she’d shown her true colors; this is the spear—not Areadbhar—he’ll use to kill her.

-

Why is it that he’s only ever hard when he is dreaming of her? Whether it’s her smiling at him, her arms around him as she teaches him to dance, or her with the knife in her heart, blood pouring from her lips, he is harder than steel and there’s only one way to make it stop.

_ Stepmother, what would you think?  _ he wonders as he pumps at his skin. He is thinner than a spear, and not so long. It’s the one part of his body where his skin remains soft. The only scars there are the ones in his mind as he stares at himself, pale in the darkness, his heart defiant as he tries to think of anything but her.

But he can’t stop himself.

Not when his heart is pumping. One moment she’s smiling at him, one moment she’s dancing with him, one moment she’s standing there in all her imperial regalia, stealing crest stones and daring the stars to defy her as she takes what she wants.

_ Take me too,  _ he wants to beg her. Isn’t that what he’d wanted? Edelgard to remember him, to want him the way he wants her—the way he’s always wanted her?

Her hand wraps around him. “Why should I?” she asks him as her fingers pump his shaft. They are softer than his, but her grip is firmer. The handle of an axe is likely closer in size to him than a spear.

“Please,” he chokes up at her. “Be better than this.” 

“I’m already good enough,” she tells him. “You though—how haven’t you failed?”

And she leaves him weeping and wanting.

-

_ We could have been siblings. We could have been lovers. _

Instead they are enemies, and he must not forget that. He is not so much a fool as to let himself forget that, surely. She occupies his every thought, his every waking hour, but it is the nights he dreads the most for at night he is weak.

Weak as he dreams her lips on his, weak as he dreams of their mother smiling and whispering to his father,  _ They could be so sweet together, couldn’t they? They look so fine a pair.  _ Two-thirds of Fodlán, united in their coupling.

She sucks on his neck, bites until there’s a bruise. He kisses her gently until she begs him for more, harder— _ just like that Dmitiri, _ always commanding him, never cursing him. Does she care about him at all? Does she think of him as anything more than a pawn on a map to be destroyed? 

He thinks he knows the answer to that. He can’t tell if that makes it better; he’s not sure it makes it worse. 

-

She is inhuman when next he sees her. That beautiful face of hers is riddled with magic, her voice echoes with doom and it should be easy to put her from his mind as he approaches her, spear in hand. 

But she smiles when as he draws near and it’s not her smile. It’s a nightmare’s smile—a distortion of everything he’s loved, everything he’s hated. He’ll be destroying a dream as much as a nightmare when he kills her and he is afraid.

“This didn’t have to be us, Edelgard,” he tells her, his voice ringing like a king’s through the hall.

“Oh, but it did,” she sighs. “It’s sweet that you still think it might have been another way.”

“I loved you once,” he tells her as he levels the spear. 

“And I loved you not at all.”

A lie. He can hear that much in her sadness as she says it.  _ It didn’t have to be this way,  _ and yet it must. 

_ Mother forgive me,  _ he thinks as he charges.

_ El—I never wanted you to die. _


End file.
